DESCRIPTION (Adapted from applicant's description): The purpose of this project is to examine mortality by ethnic group in the former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan from 1959 to 1999. There are major uncertainties about ethnic- specific mortality levels and trends for this population that were unable to be addressed previously due to the lack of available data. The applicant intends to narrow substantially the range of uncertainty by using newly- available census and vital registration data from the National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic (NatsStatKom) and by applying demographic estimation procedures that are well-suited to these data. Using a variety of demographic techniques, the quality of census and vital registration data will be assessed, and improved estimates of mortality by ethnic group will be produced. These methods include intercensal comparison of cohort size; a procedure based on the reported age distribution of deaths and age-specific growth rates; and a procedure for producing life tables directly from the age distribution of the population and age-specific growth rates. A particular focus of this research is infant and child mortality by ethnic group. Using reported monthly probabilities of dying below age two since 1959 and individual census reports of women regarding their number of births and child deaths in 1989 and 1999, improved and independent estimates of infant and child mortality by ethnicity will be produced for the period 1959-1999. These estimates will permit an assessment of the quality of the reported trends and allow a substantive analysis of the differential effect of the post-Soviet transition period on the child mortality conditions of the various ethnic groups. Behavioral and biomedical risk factor distributions among the various ethnic groups will then be estimated using the 1993 Kyrgyzstan Multipurpose Poverty Survey (KMPS), and the extent to which these risk factor distributions could account for the corresponding mortality differentials at the aggregate level will be assessed.